I recently met a friend in the supermarket who, upon seeing me, decided I presented an opportunity to stamp her feet in anger. Another relationship it seems, had just crashed and burned. “Men only get a brain after 40!” she declared in that slightly unnerving way you could never get away with if it were you making the same generalisation about women to a woman.
But, as women often do, she had a point. Reaching 40 is a watershed of sorts, especially for men. It’s a slowing, a changing down through the gears as the madness passes. We understand that there’s a reason why we have two ears and only a mouth and we begin a process that gradually makes us become better people - or at least less revolting, gauche, shallow and selfish.
It must have something – perhaps everything, who knows – to do with our first glimpse of mortality. Our friends develop life-changing illnesses. A few even die. We notice the aging process. Limbs and organs that once purred like Bentleys begin to rattle. The squash court is now a place where you might have an acute myocardial infarction, while personal trainers will gently advise against high-impact activities, encouraging us instead to swim or cycle. “It’s excellent for your age group and helps toning,” they will say with pep. Quite.
Another sad fact of life is that we can’t eat and drink what we want in the same way. That murky thing we call a metabolism, so we are told, begins to slow and before you know it, a slight thickening around the middle heralds the start of a long, and in most cases, futile battle. Oh yes, and hair, if hasn’t started to already fall out, will begin to do so, or at the very least, pop up in other, less appealing areas for which you will then buy dinky devices for its removal.
Arguably the biggest kick in the balls is the realisation that women you might still consider as suitable mating partners see you as an old git, nearer their father’s age than yours. In this vortex of confusion, worldlier friends will tell you that the French have a formula one can apply to this new dilemma: half your age plus seven. Any woman younger than that is verboten, or should I say interdit. Thus for anyone in their late 40s, the under 35s are out of bounds, but if we get there, at 80 we can date a 47-year-old. There is hope.
In the meantime, aging brings more immediate benefits, as we embrace things that would have had us heading for the door just a few years earlier. We ‘get’ gardening, we see the point in walking holidays, we rejoice in buying furniture and curtain fabric, we take out a pension, we get aquiver when we spot, say a desirable Damascene door-knocker and finally, we understand why people enjoy collecting art. All these and more, signpost a transition from pointless young man into (one hopes), a marginally more relevant, slightly older, man.
Preferring to stay in with an improving book and a glass (ok, a bottle) of decent wine is another milestone. Nightclubs? What’s the point? You are grateful that your brain has been rewired to question why it is that seemingly intelligent people willingly pay over the odds to spend all night drinking in a large, dark room with loud music and second-hand smoke. I mean, do they get enough sleep?
The promise of joy that was once a bottle of vodka at a Mykonos bar as a doe-eyed stranger hung on your every word and Moby played in the background has been replaced with a cup of green tea and the delicious anticipation of everything that the box set of Season 3 of Borgen can deliver.
Boring? Me? You bet. But it feels fantabulous.
